The Eutychus Perch by Hurricane at Hypocrisy.com

“Calvinist by Free Choice” is a sign illustrating my last entry at this website. It’s a clever little piece of tomfoolery, because everyone knows Calvinists don’t believe in free choice, right?

Wrong.

As the conundrum is expounded by Jonathan Edwards, whom many even in the secular world hold to have been the greatest of all American philosophers, we humans have freedom, but not free will.

Got that? Think it’s double-talk? I once angered a hyper-Calvinist pastor by challenging his statement, “You don’t have any choice about whether you’re saved or not.” The fact that John Calvin was abundantly clear on the biblical doctrine that “whosoever will may come” failed to move him.

In any case, Calvin only wrote about a page and a half in his Institutes of the Christian Religion on predestination, which comes as a shock to many who, never having read him, take him to be the ogre of determinism. Calvinism might be the most misunderstood ideology in the world. Calvin’s view, as expounded by Edwards in his masterful Freedom of the Will, holds that every person has the ability to make choices, in other words, possesses the freedom to choose, but that each choice is determined by all the influences working on that person.

John Calvin, who had been expected to become one of the greats of French jurisprudence, laid down a principle for winning an argument:  Determine the most essential point of the issue under dispute and hammer away at it until your opponent has nowhere left to stand. In Freedom of the Will, Edwards does exactly that. The entire text consists of a close examination of a single act of the will. Edwards asks whether the person in question can be said to choose A or B without anything influencing that choice. In other words, is that will absolutely free to choose either alternative, without being moved in one direction or the other by anything at all, internal or external? He attempts to demonstrate that an affirmative answer is patently absurd because the free will advocate is postulating an effect without a cause. It is fairly obvious to most of us that any decision is moved by all the factors within the chooser’s psychological makeup.
Nevertheless, the person facing a choice is free to make that choice, and as such is responsible for it. Yes, says Edwards, this leaves us in an unresolvable mystery involving how a person can be condemned for making a choice determined by all the factors that have influenced his or her tendencies, but any other approach to the problem leads to difficulties which are as bad or worse.
Recently an individual with apparently solid credentials as an American historian made the statement that Calvinists are the most insecure of people because they believe it is impossible for anyone to know whether he or she is among the elect.  Curiously, Roman Catholics have traditionally faulted Calvinists for believing the exact opposite. To the Catholic it appears that the true Calvinist is arrogant in declaring his or her assurance of salvation. The truth is that Calvin taught that the appropriation of salvation by faith on the part of an individual constitutes proof that the individual is among the elect. Furthermore, he answered his Catholic critics, there is no arrogance to the acceptance of such an assurance, because the believer has done absolutely nothing to merit that salvation.
Still, the truth is that in colonial times in America the Calvinism that the Puritans and Separatists had brought from England decayed into what we call hyper-Calvinism, in which people really did believe they had no choice, and that no one could know who was among the elect. They came to believe that one had to prove one’s election to oneself and the community by being a diligent, hard-working person. Since such an attitude normally led to a certain affluence, that theory in turn deteriorated into a belief that the rich were good and the poor were bad. Needless to say, an enormous amount of damage was done by this ideology, because many came to believe the poor were unworthy of being helped or even treated with dignity.
Ironically, Marxism eventually crept into American thinking by degrees, with the result that quite often we are confronted with the idea that the poor are good and the rich are bad. The film Titanic is an excellent example. About the only upper class individual who is viewed in a positive light is the one who symbolically descends to steerage and dances and celebrates with the pure and innocent proletariat.
Neither of these extremes is anything but false and dangerous, of course, and Calvinism in its genuine form rejects them. I recall my first sight of a Presbyterian church in Bristol, Tennessee, a traditional one in that its membership was largely upper middle class. As I drove up I noticed that a very poorly dressed man was walking up the stairs. He was warmly welcomed and ushered in, as I recall, by the vice mayor, a judge and the CEO of the local Coca Cola bottling plant. That is genuine Calvinism in practice.
As an Orthodox Presbyterian friend wrote yesterday, “I’m thankful that God chose me and then freed me and empowered me to choose him.”

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